this is a gift, it comes with a price
by amoenavi
Summary: Damon and Elena. Forget and forgive. In that order. / For Secret Santa on damon elena lj.


**Prompt **(from _Secret Santa _on damon_elena on lj): Damon comforts a depressed Elena because she misses her parents during Christmas.

-x-

It's the little things that go first.

She wakes up one day and finds that she can't quite get the tone of her mother's voice right. It sounds too high, too musical, too low, too rough, never exactly the way it was. In her head, the accent is always off, the inflection's just a little too stilted to be right.

The next thing to go is the feel of her father's hand on her back. How big? How much pressure? Was it his thumb or his pinky finger that would curl in?

It's not noticeable. The forgetfulness.

She thinks it should be.

-x-

She's seventeen, her vampire boyfriend and his serial-killer brother are trying to protect her from the oldest vampire in existence who is out for her blood, her brother is sneaking around trying to be freaking Buffy the Vampire Slayer, her history teacher is sleeping with her aunt and drugging werewolves in his free time, and her best friends are Vampire Barbie and a Judgy the Witch respectively. She thinks she gets a little leeway in forgetting her mother's voice.

-x-

"My Mom was beautiful," she says fondly, plucking the picture from her mirror and giving it to Stefan on a particularly nostalgic day. "Her hair was always perfect, even when she was just waking up." Elena picks at a strand of her own straightened brown hair. The hints of split ends poke out from the sleekness. "I always wondered why mine was such a mess." She sighs. "Wrong genes apparently. That whole adopted cousin thing explains a lot. No one ever told me I looked like her or my father. The really kind ones would say that I looked like a Gilbert without saying which one I looked like." She makes a face in the mirror. "I always hated being told I looked like my uncle. Now I know why, I guess." Lifts her hands up, pulls at flesh and examines the faded picture of her father, her mother, and her uncle-father as teenagers at the bottom of the mirror. Lets go. "I didn't look like her. But she was beautiful."

"I know."

Her head snaps up to look at him in the mirror. He sits on her bed, holding the picture in his hands, staring at it with an intense look that makes her frown, the wistfulness of memories fading. "What? You know?"

He nods, distracted. "Elena, I saw her." He turns the picture over in his hands, reads the date scrawled on the back. "This was the summer before the accident." He looks at it intently and she turns, has this overwhelming urge to take it back. Doesn't want to share this part of herself with him.

She clasps her hands behind her back instead, keeps them still. "When did you see her?"

He finally looks up, eyes filled with pity and sadness. "The night I pulled you out of the car."

Suddenly every part of Elena feels cold, her head is waterlogged. She can remember the water, the freezing water beneath the bridge. She remembers seeing her mother and her father before passing out. The last time she'd ever see them and it was through the dark water that would kill them.

Wait –

"You saw them after I did," she says, putting it together. "You saw them after I passed out." She sifts through her memories, "You were the last person to see them."

He nods, that same look of sympathetic wariness on his face.

Somewhere in her sluggish brain she can feel herself detaching. There's anger, hurt, betrayal, pain, confusion, numbness. But mostly, she can feel those fingers of grief gripping her heart again. She'd thought that she'd had that moment with her parents. That she was the last one to see them before they died. That she was the last thing they saw.

She was wrong.

"I – " he begins.

"Stefan." She can't. "I think… I think you should, uh, you should go."

The last thing her parents saw before they died was a boy they didn't even know.

-x-

They break up for good on a Thursday in October.

She cries for three days straight before she catches sight of her mother's picture.

That Monday, she grits her teeth, curls her hair, and goes to school with her shoulders back.

She meets Stefan's eyes in the hallway and nods. She thinks she feels something splinter away but. Her momma didn't raise a woman who fell apart over a boy.

-x-

And then it's Christmas, senior year. A time of rest. Elijah assures her that Klaus is in fact deeply religious and would never kill anyone during Advent or Christmas through Epiphany.

Elena thinks that's the most ridiculous thing she's ever heard but she'll take the reprieve. A nice Christmas gift, if she says so herself.

The Salvatore brothers aren't so sure.

-x-

"I really don't think this is necessary," she complains upon opening the door to find both Salvatores with hot chocolate and Christmas cookies in tow.

"Relax, Elena," the older one says, forcing his way in. "We're not here for you. Jenna invited us." He stops, turns. "Well, she invited me. Stefan's just a tagalong. _Buuuuut _he brought cookies."

She observes the younger Salvatore with something close to a smile. "Damon dragged you?"

He nods.

-x-

It becomes something like a ritual. She comes home afterschool, does her homework, and at 6:00 pm she opens the door for the Salvatores, always bearing freshly baked Christmas food for them. Damon would get set up in the kitchen, chatting idly with Jenna, Alaric and Jeremy while Stefan updates Elena on the status of the town in terms of its designation as the supernatural hotspot. They would then decorate the house, the tree, or, on one disastrous occasion, weave boxwood wreaths until 9:00 pm when Stefan fakes a yawn and is forced out by his "strict" older brother.

It feels a lot like family.

(She can't remember how many laugh lines were around her father's eyes the last time she saw him.)

-x-

"You look like your mother," Damon says, hands in the pockets of his signature leather jacket.

She is absolutely getting him a new one for Christmas.

She frowns minutely, a thin line forming between her eyebrows. "My birth mother is a psychotic, heartless bitch who leaves nothing but destruction in her wake. I look like her. _Awesome_."

He shakes his head with a smile. "Not Isobel." He points, hands still in his pockets to the ornament she had just picked up, a glass plated framed picture of her mother. Her real mother. "You look like your mother."

"What?" comes out as a startled laugh. She shakes her head no. "We don't look alike at all."

He shoots her a look that means something between "are you looking at the same picture I am?" and "you're dumb".

He makes his way through the boxes of ornaments littering the living room of their house. "Right here," he says, "she has a dimple mid-laugh." His finger traces the small indentation on her mother's cheek. "You get one too… when you actually laugh." She meets his eyes then, shock and pleasant surprise mixing on her face. There is not an ounce of insincerity on his face.

That's maybe when she starts to really forgive him.

(Her mother's eyes were green with specks of grey in them.

Or was it blue…)

-x-

This fragile façade of happiness that Elena has managed to cocoon herself in crashes down around her on the 22nd.

The Christmas tree tips over, something defective in the balance of the branches, the weight of the ornaments, something.

She hears the clamor from her bedroom, writing in her journal. Somehow, she knows exactly what she will find when she runs down there. She takes the stairs three at a time, hopping over the banister just in time to see the shocked panic on the faces of both Salvatores and Jeremy.

"No."

She looks over at Stefan unconsciously, wanting him to say something to make it better. Something to make it right. He just looks back.

"No."

Jeremy has a hand up to his face, rubbing away a headache from his temples.

"No."

Damon's picking up the tree now, fastening it back in the stand. Many ornaments stayed on.

All Elena can see is the mess of shattered glass on the floor.

"No!"

She's on her hands and knees. The glass is everywhere, sharp pieces sticking into her hands as she tries to salvage the ornaments. Red glass, blue glass, green glass, they all stick into her hands as she grabs everything worth saving.

Her homemade candycane from first grade is in six pieces. She can fix it, she thinks, grabs it, cuts herself on the edges.

Jeremy's first ornament, seven pieces. One missing. It can be incomplete, she thinks, grabs it.

The picture of her mother is splintered around the face, distorting the smile underneath. She picks it up, holds it in her left hand.

Her father's Rudolph from 1968. The nose is shattered, unbearably sharp as it pierces the skin on her hand.

_"Elena – " _

The Christmas tree her grandmother gave her when she was nine, eight pieces. Fixable, fixable.

School bus for her first day of school, three pieces, half missing. She can make the other half. Shoves it in the pocket in her sweatshirt with the others, doesn't blink as it cuts into her skin.

Feels hands on her shoulders, forcing her back. _"Elena." _

"No," she says again, firmly, pulls against them. She sees the snowman that talks underneath the couch and struggles to get it. Hands on the ground, she feels tiny pricking sensations before they fade into each other.

_"It's not worth it." _Sound of a push. It's not a crash so Elena doesn't pay attention, focused entirely on the white snowman with the black tophat. _"What the hell, Damon? Let me stop her." __  
_  
There's pressure against her shoulders again. She pushes, twists out of their grasp, falls into the shards. Her arms hurt. The snowman is still there.

_"She needs to do this." _

She needs to reach underneath the couch for it. Her arm scrapes against the ground and she's suddenly aware of a sharp burning sensation up the inside of it. Ignores it, keeps reaching for the red scarf coming off the side.

_"Would you look at her? She's cutting herself up."_ She feels it, the hard, smooth plastic. She's got it.

_"I said _leave it_." __  
_  
She pulls her arm back from beneath the couch, holding on to the trinket for dear life.

Stares, confused, when it turns red in her grasp.

Her father's old Winnie the Pooh ornament. She moves toward it. Completely intact, crack up the side.

She hears the soft thud of someone joining her on the floor. Sound of clearing glass.

"Let me take these," he says. Her mother's first ornament, two pieces. Easy.

A gentle hand reaches into the pocket of her sweatshirt. The sharpness pressing into her abdomen goes away.

She looks down, sees a tiny shard. The image of an eye is painted onto it.

"Oh, no," she says, slowly lifting it up. A green eye, familiar. "No, no, no."

The ornament. The ornament of the picture of the four of them. One of a kind. Shattered.

Not replaceable.

Her parents were dead. They couldn't sit to be painted again.

"Elena," the same voice says. The hand is back, soft on hers. It gently pries the eye from her iron grip. _"Elena." _

She lifts her eyes from the ground.

"It's gone, isn't it?"

Damon's face is full of empathy and pain. "Shattered. Completely." He swallows. "I'm sorry."

She sits back onto her heels. Raises a hand to wipe away the tears from her eyes and is somehow surprised to see the cuts and blood. "Oh, wow." Raises her other hand to check. Bloodied and cut. "Oh, _wow." __  
_  
His lips thin. "Yeah, it's a little like a D level horror movie in here. Under normal circumstances, I would say _delicious_." He lifts the ornaments that he had taken from her pocket. They're stained with blood. "But this is just overkill."

She nods slowly, trying to get a sense of what happened. "Stefan?"

"Left already," he replies. "As soon as you went all Carrie on us, he realized that he needed to go. I'm sure he's eating Thumper as we speak."

She blinks. Once, twice. "Jeremy?"

"After he tried to save you from your masochistic rescue mission, he went upstairs."

"Thank you," she says. Means it.

"It gets better, you know," he replies suddenly. "The little orphan Annie bit. It – it does get better."

She sniffs. "Yeah – and when does it go away? After 145 years?"

There's a grim smile on his lips. "Never."

She's quiet. Her mom's trill laugh in her ears, her father's gruff voice in her head. The smell of his cologne mixing with the coffee in the morning. Her mother's hands that always somehow smelled of newsprint from the crosswords. The feel of Mom's sticky lipstick kiss against her cheek. Dad's stubble on the weekends. "I think – I sometimes forget to remember them." She breaks off, "Jesus, that sounds so silly. I just meant… I miss them so much. I know I miss them. But I'm beginning to forget things. Things… I should know. Things like the color of the flecks in her eyes. The number of laugh lines around his. What color she would wear the most. His favorite kind of coffee. I don't – I mean, I don't always remember them perfectly. And I would know them if I – I'm just so _preoccupied_." His eyes are so blue. "I don't get to just… sit back and miss them. I always have to be on the lookout for a vampire or a werewolf or a warlock with a vendetta and I can't just lie in bed and think about things like that."

He nods. "My mother – she was beautiful. She was the only person I've ever known who loved me unconditionally. Loved me equally with Stefan." Elena almost ducks her head but sticks it up. It's not an accusation. This isn't about her. "She was so strong and then she wasn't and then she was dead. You just have to remember that – " he scoffs, "Okay, I'm about to sound like Stefan so you need to not tell anyone about this greeting card moment. God. You just have to remember… that you love them. It doesn't matter if you remember their eye speck color, Elena. That's not forgetting them."

Elena sees him. She sees the real him, the human Damon who loved and trusted with all his heart and had it handed back to him in pieces so many times that he decided to keep it fragmented himself. She sees him through the distorted glass of a broken ornament, twisted, shattered but still worth something.

Still worth saving.

"Damon – "

_"Don't," _he responds sharply. "Just…" he sighs. "Please save the mush." His gaze strays to her hands again. "Let's get you cleaned up before Elijah comes by and decides you'd be good for a snack." He blurs out of the room.

"You're a good person, Damon," she calls after him. "You can't fool me."

"But I can always try."

-x-

She drops his present off on Christmas, leaves it with Stefan alongside his. He smiles when he reads the note.

It's the splintered framed ornament of her mother.

With his picture.

And a note.

_This is worth saving._

-x-


End file.
